The only thing that scares me about Roman Polanski‘s intention to direct an adaptation of Robert Harris‘s “The Ghost“, a just-published political thriller, is a statement given to Variety‘s Tatiana Siegel by Harris that “most of the story takes place in an oceanfront house during the middle of winter,” which Harris called “classic Polanski territory.”
What Harris means, I suspect, is that an oceanfront home is precisely the same kind of setting Polanski used in Death and the Maiden (1994), a well-written parlor drama that ranks in everyone’s memory as a respectable but middling, and even a touch boring. Note to Polanski and Harris: minimize the oceanfront home scenes and take the story elsewhere. I don’t care if it’s a bathroom in a freeway pit-stop gas station — just don’t resuscitate Death and the Maiden….please!
The Amazon description of Harris’s book: “Adam Lang [read: Tony Blair] has been Britain’s longest-serving and most controversial prime minister of the last half century. And now that he’s left office, he’s accepted one of history’s largest cash advances to compose a tell-all (or at least, tell-some) memoir of his life and years of power.
“As pressure mounts for Lang to complete this magnum opus, he hires a professional ghostwriter to finish the book. As he sets to work, the ghostwriter discovers many more secrets than Lang intends to reveal — secrets with the power to alter world politics, [and] secrets with the power to kill.”
An Amnazon reader reports that “the primary setting for ‘The Ghost’ is Martha’s Vineyard in the winter.”
1994)
